A lab technician working at a New Jersey State Police drug testing station has been accused of fabricating drug test results, potentially upsetting almost 8, 000 criminal cases in the state. Read more…
Read More:
Fabricated Lab Result Puts Almost 8,000 Criminal Cases in Doubt
This summer, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Apple violated federal antitrust law by conspiring to fix the price of ebooks. The court called Apple’s price fixing the “supreme evil of antitrust.” Today, the Supreme Court has rejected Apple’s appeal . Read more…
Excerpt from:
Apple Must Pay $450 Million for ‘Supreme Evil of Antitrust’ Ebook Scheme
Brazilian police arrested the vice president of Facebook in Latin America because WhatsApp did not comply with a court order to share data. Read more…
Continued here:
Facebook Exec Arrested in Brazil Because WhatsApp Didn’t Share Data With Police
An anonymous reader writes: Last Shmoocon, famous reverse engineer Travis Goodspeed presented his jailbreak of the Chinese MD380 digital handheld radio. The hack has since been published at GitHub with all needed source code to turn a cheap digital radio into the first hardware scanner for DMR digital mobile radio: a firmware patch for promiscuous mode that puts all talk groups through the speaker including private calling. In the U.S. the competing APCO-25 is a suite of standards for digital radio communications for federal users, but a lot of state/county and local public safety organizations including city police dispatch channels are using the Mototrbo MotorolaDMR digital standard. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See original article:
Jailbreak Turns Cheap Walkie-Talkie Into DMR Police Scanner
BlackBerry smartphones have secure messaging as a matter of course, but for some that isn’t enough: there are custom models that are even more secure thanks to PGP-encrypted mail. However, it seems that these locked down models aren’t quite as safe as you’d think. The Netherlands Forensic Institute has confirmed a recent report that it’s capable of scooping up encrypted data from PGP-equipped BlackBerry devices. It’s not discussing the exact techniques involved, but it’s relying on a tool from CelleBrite to get the job done. One possibility is that investigators are guessing the password based on a memory dump, although that normally requires yanking a memory chip off the phone’s motherboard. If it’s any consolation, police need physical access to crack these BlackBerrys. Their methods also aren’t completely reliable (a small batch couldn’t be cracked), and it’s uncertain that this will work with every single PGP implementation. GhostPGP, for instance, claims that it’s unaffected. All the same, this isn’t very comforting if you bought a customized BlackBerry with the promise of airtight security. And there’s no certainty that only Dutch cops have access — it’s entirely possible that other law enforcement and surveillance agencies know these tricks. [Image credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images] Source: Misdaadnieuws (translated) , Motherboard
Read More:
Police claim to have cracked extra-secure BlackBerry phones
How can law enforcement agencies track down some of the world’s most (in)famous pirates? The same way that we find out how our school frenemies are doing: stalking them on social media. TorrentFreak has investigated the recent convictions of three of the UK’s biggest file-sharers to learn how exactly they were caught. It turns out that copyright enforcement officials are doing the same sort of armchair-sleuthing that we all do, only that they’ve got a hotline straight to the police. For instance, 22-year-old Reece Baker was more commonly known by his online alias, Baker92. According to the report, his fatal mistake was to include a shout-out to his “baby momzie Ria” in an NFO (info) file. Officials at the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft guessed that Baker92 was a surname/year of birth combination. They then searched Equifax’s credit-rating database to find anyone born in 1992 with that surname and, potentially, a child with a woman named Ria. Similarly, 24-year-old Sahil Rafiq posted torrents under a wide variety of usernames, including memory100, hail_alpha and sohail20. Unfortunately, the sohail20 identity was also used on the customer support website for an online retailer. Rafiq had posted a question concerning his laptop, but signed the piece “Kind Regards, Sahil Rafiq.” With his real name, authorities took very little time in finding his Facebook profile and, from there, were able to alert the police. Facebook was also the petard by which 40-year-old Graeme ‘Reidy’ Reid was hoisted, since he used the same anonymous e-mail account on his profile as he did his piracy. FACT bods simply searched for his Hushmail address and his Facebook page popped up — where he’d obligingly listed his occupation as “encoder.” We’ve not checked, but presumably bank robbers are going to start making similarly honest alternations to their social media pages in the near future. As much as FACT would like you to think twice about sharing illegally-obtained material around the web, there’s another moral here. After all, if enforcement officers were able to find these people with a few well-chosen Google searches, then perhaps the secret is to not be so forthcoming with your personal information. Source: TorrentFreak , FACT
The Guardian and Reuters are reporting that police have raided the home of Craig Wright , an Australian CEO who was identified today in investigations by Gizmodo and Wired as a likely candidate for the secret identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of Bitcoin. Read more…
Excerpt from:
Reports: Police Raid Home of Possible Bitcoin Creator Craig Wright
An anonymous reader writes: The old Conficker worm was found on new police body cameras that were taken out of the box by security researchers from iPower Technologies. The worm is detected by almost all security vendors, but it seems that it is still being used because modern day IoT devices can’t yet run security products. This allows the worm to spread, and propagate to computers when connected to an unprotected workstation. One police computer is enough to allow attackers to steal government data. The source of the infection is yet unknown. It is highly unlikely that the manufacturer would do this. Middleman involved in the shipping are probably the cause. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View article:
Police Body Cameras Come With Pre-Installed Malware
This afternoon Aleksandr Milewski posted a picture that suggested the ticket-less streak might come to an end, but now Google says its car was flagged down because it was going so slowly. These new prototype models are classified as “Neighborhood Electric Vehicles” and have their speeds capped at 25mph, so they stick to slower-moving streets. The officer had some questions about the car, which is apparently common for the cartoony vehicles. According to Google, its self-driving vehicles have driven 1.2 million miles, or the equivalent of 90 years of experience for an average person — and probably still can’t get an insurance discount. Source: Aleksandr Milewski (Facebook) , Google Self-Driving Car Project (G+)
See original article:
Google’s cars have driven 1.2 million miles without getting a ticket
An anonymous reader writes: Nine major banks, including Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan have teamed up to bring Bitcoin’s blockchain technology to financial markets. “Over the past year, interest in blockchain technology has grown rapidly. It has already attracted significant investment from many major banks, which reckon it could save them money by making their operations faster, more efficient and more transparent.” Leaving aside the question of whether banks actually want to become more transparent, they’re funding a firm dedicated to running tests on how data can be shared and collected through the blockchain. “The blockchain works as a huge, decentralized ledger of every bitcoin transaction ever made that is verified and shared by a global network of computers and therefore is virtually tamper-proof. … The data that can be secured using the technology is not restricted to bitcoin transactions. Two parties could use it to exchange any other information, within minutes and with no need for a third party to verify it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View the original here:
Nine of World’s Biggest Banks Create Blockchain Partnership